We study the impact of the 2015 mass arrival of refugees to Germany on residential housing rents. Using unique data on end of year county-level refugee populations and data on monthly offers of flats for rent from Germany’s leading online property broker Immobilienscout24, we find strong...

Much has been written identifying property price effects of historic preservation policies. Little attention has been paid to the possible policy endogeneity in hedonic price models. This paper outlines a general case of land use regulation in the presence of externalities and then demonstrates...

We estimate empirically the effect of immigration on house prices and residential construction activity in Spain over the period 1998-2008. This decade is characterized by both a spectacular housing market boom and a stunning immigration wave. We exploit the variation in immigration across...

Neighborhoods are the result of a complicated interplay between residential choice, housing supply and the influences of the larger metropolitan system on its constituent parts. We model this interplay as a system of reduced-form equations in order to examine the effects of a generous spatially...

Existing literature documents that house prices respond to monetary policy surprises with a significant delay, taking years to reach their peak response. We present new evidence of a much faster response. We exploit information contained in listings for the residential properties for sale in the...

We estimate the transmission of the pandemic shock in 2020 to prices in the residential and commercial real estate market by causal machine learning, using new granular data at the municipal level for Germany. We exploit differences in the incidence of Covid infections or short-time work at the...

Participants to an online study in Luxembourg are presented with fictitious real-estate advertisements and tasked to make an offer for each of them. A random subset is also shown sellers' names that are strongly framed to signal their origins. Our randomised procedure allows us to conclude that,...

We study the effects on employment, costs of living, and income inequality of local shocks in the housing market or in the productivity of a tradable good. We construct a two-region search and matching model in which housing is considered a necessity good. Mobility of labor implies that any...

We study the effects of rental price changes on college enrollment rates. We exploit cross-district variation in the size and timing of local rental price booms in Germany during the 2010s. A one standard deviation increase in apartment rents decreased per-capita college enrollment by 1.1...

The housing market is subject to search frictions in buying and selling houses. This paper documents the role of inflows (new listings) and outflows (sales) in explaining the volatility and co-movement of housing-market variables. An 'ins versus outs' decomposition shows that both inflows and...